Best Program/File Format for Ripping CD Collection?
 

Alright, I've finally purchased a new hard drive, 120 GB, and I want to rip my entire CD collection (about 500 cd's) onto it. I've used MusicMatch in the past for ripping selected tracks from cd's, but I'm not particularly enamored with it. I don't currently have an mp3 player, I think if I were to get one I'd lean towards an iPod...but I don't know. I want to be able to include a field in the tag file for "Producer" (I don't imagine this is a problem).

So I'm looking for opinions on what program to use to rip all this...and what format I should do it in (mp3, aac, wma, etc?)

i use exact audio copy (eac) with the lame codec. makes great mp3s

Depends on your needs. There are a couple of flavors of lossless audio compression that are highly recommended for long-term archiving, as they lose absolutely nothing compared to the original (except some of the file size). Problem is, virtually nothing aside from your computer will play them.

If your goal is to play your music on portables and car decks and everything else, then high-quality mp3 still rules. And you can get almost perfect quality with the correct encoding scheme.

For CD ripping programs, there are 2 best choices:

EAC (Exact Audio Copy)

CDex

EAC can be a bit more difficult to set up in some cases, and it also tends to rip a bit slower. But it has two notable advantages over CDex: 1) it has superior error-detection on old/scratched disks and will keep trying to get a good rip rather than just settling for one with errors and 2) when used with an external encoder, it can queue up encoding jobs so you can rip CDs as fast as you like and let the encoding jobs stack up to finish after you go to bed. Other rippers are linear and you have to wait for each job to finish in its entirety before you can swap CDs.

For mp3 encoding, there is really only one way to go: LAME using the internal preset --alt-preset standard

LAME recommended version

The definitive source for more information

Don't be swayed by the availability of other presets with impressive names like Extreme, they just add more bits for bragging rights and add nothing to the sound quality except in very rare cases that seem to involve certain delicate pieces of classical music and very expensive playback systems. Same thing goes for encoding at straight 320 kbps, it seems like a good idea but you miss out on optimizations that are only available in the presets, so straight 320s end up sounding worse as well as being twice as big.

Hope some of this helps.

If I may, I'd like to give a hearty second to CDex, which I'd found at tinyapps.org.

It's small, easy to use, powerful, and best of all it uses resources well. When I ripped all of my CDs to MP3s I simply sat and used my computer as normal, put one disc in each drive, ripped away. Change discs a bit later, repeat.

As antisuck suggested, I will do the same: EAC and CDex are wonderful. I would use EAC over anything else though, since it will slow down your drive and read your media a few times if it detects errors to make sure you can get the best possible recording.

If you don't want large file sizes, high quality, and you are not looking to synchronize your media to an external device (eg iPod), encode your media into the OGG format, you'll get much better quality.

OTOH, if you do want to synchronize your media to an external device, purchase a Neuros Audio device. It is open source (AFAIK) and supports the OGG format.

The above statement is true. The Hydrogen Audio forum guys are obsessed. Check out the Roberto's public listening tests page, which is discussed extensively on Hydrogen Audio. They have developed a perfect blind testing method.

If you really want to be obsessive, get an even bigger hard drive and archive every CD to one of the lossless methods (FLAC, SHIN, lossless AAC, etc.). You can store that hard drive in a fireproof safe somewhere. When you get a portable music player, calcluate how big you can make each file using your preferred compression method, and do an overnight (or perhaps multi-day) recompression from the master external drive to a different location. Repeat as necessary as codecs improve.

The recommended encoder version is: Dibrom's compile of LAME 3.90.3. EAC is the recommended grabber because of its ability to do secure mode audio ripping which prevents skips/glitches/errors. The only LAME switch you should use is --alt-preset standard, also known as APS. There is a LAME 3.90.3 mod out that rips in APS, no matter what switches are passed to it.

Thank you all for the information.

Eventually I will probably be purchasing some sort of external player. As is right now, I have a 512 MB SD card that i use for mp3's on my Treo. I've thought maybe I could get away with buying a 1 GB card and just changing the albums on it a few times a week...but I'm sure that would quickly get annoying and it'd only be a matter of time before I purchased a hard drive based player.

That's a hell of an idea...I'll have to do some reasearch on these codecs...but how big a drive would I need for this lossless copy of my library? I'm close to 500 CD's.

Oh, and I didn't mention initially, but I have stuff on vinyl that I'd probably like to encode...quick glance at the CDex page shows it supports analog line-in...I suppose EAC is strictly CD?

One last question, the APS for Lame is what, 128 VBR?

Thanks again. Off to dig through the hydrogenaudio forums a bit...

That would make a great online calculator; I wonder if there is one? Anyway, the lossless codecs are all variable bit rate (VBR), but I think that they average 700-800 kbps*. A CD is recorded at 1411 kbps constant bit rate (CBR). Lossy codecs usually are done between 128 and 320 kbps. The average CD is, I dunno, maybe 45 minutes? Get our your calculators...

* This is a WAG (wild-ass guess). Someone else can probably correct me.

EDIT: Just did the math. Assuming I am right about the 45 minutes and 800 kbps, you would need about 135 GB. So that's really not out of line. Remember, 8 bits in a byte!

antisuck and redlemon already covered most of what I was going to say.
You could go with Wavpack Hybrid and keep the correction files on CD-R if space becomes an issue. Would be easy to tag and transcode them to whatever codec works best for a portable via Foobar2k.

<semantic mode>It is Ogg-Vorbis, Ogg is merely the container that can hold other things like the seldom used Ogg-Flac option.
</semantic mode>Have seen that common error enough times out there where I feel compelled to correct it now whenever it crops up.

I have tried the latest Winamp and MusicMatch Jukebox, neither could get the CD info correctly. I then tried Windows Media Player 10 with MP3 ripping built-in and it ripped a set of 10 CDs (in Chinese no less) correctly in their individual folders. You might want to give it a try. WMP10 is only for WinXP.

EAC has a "record wav" function as well as the ability to encode wavs, so if you decide to use EAC as your primary CD ripper you could use it to do your vinyl too.

Also, depending on how quick you are with the "record" button, you may find you want some kind of basic audio editor to trim tone arm clunks and excess silence from those tracks before encoding them.

APS goes up to 320 as required and I believe it goes as low as 64 to save space during silent passages and such, but don't quote me on that. It may be 96 or 128 at the bottom end.

Alright, I've started ripping with EAC and encoding via LAME @ APS...how do I set up what you're describing here?

In EAC, select the "EAC Options" menu and the "Tools" tab. Put a check in "On extraction, start external compressors queued in the background".

The status bar at the bottom of EAC will tell you how many encoding jobs are still waiting in line at any given time.

ITunes........ Since your leaning toward the Ipod. You can setup Itunes to auto Rip and eject the cd when it's finished. You have the choices of what fields to include. Some people say that AAC at 128 sounds as good as MP3 at 160. It will also have a smaller file size.

I use nero and Roxio both work great

Ditto. I don't pretend to be a computer guru, but I am a gadget guy. I have a 40G ipod and I've put almost 3000 songs (just under 11G in AAC) so far, and I think they sound great. The vast majority of them were ripped straight from my large CD collection. Just my .02.

There is, it's called www.google.com
Seriously, enter
45 minutes*500*800kbps in GB
and it returns
(45 minutes) * 500 * (800 kbps) = 128.746033 gigabytes

Yup, google calc. rules.

Cool, I knew about that tool, but didn't think about it for this case. I wonder how many units they have available? (Also, I used factors of 1000 instead of 1024 in my calc, to allow for file headers and such.)

I have been a longtime fan of Musicmatch but over the past year they have been phasing out their support of the ipod. So my advance to you is that if you want an ipod just start out with iTunes so you can aviod the headached that I am currently going through.

I'm gonna throw in another vote for iTunes here. I'm and audiophile and I am more than happy with 128k AAC's while listening to my iPod or PowerBook. When I first got into ripping music, I did them all in 256k MP3 and when iTunes was released for Windows I moved over to 192k AAC. I recently kicked it back to 128k AAC. I figured that the listening I do on my iPod is already compromised (city noise and whatnot) so I wasn't really concerned with the ultimate in audio purity.